As a simple example of what I would like to do, suppose I have a list a of all real numbers. I would like to perform a simple check to see if some element of a is positive. Of course, I could do this with a simple loop, but I feel as if Mathematica would have a more efficient way of doing this, in the spirit of functional programming. Is there, or do I just have to do this with a clumsy loop:

test=False; For[counter=1;counter<=Length[a];counter++;If[a[[counter]]>0,test=True;];];